InventoryByHand

Guide

Keep Your Inventory Where It Can't Be Deleted

An inventory only helps if it is still there on the worst day. Two quiet risks take lists away: a browser that clears a site's stored data on its own schedule, and a company whose servers hold the only copy. Both risks have plain fixes. This page explains them in plain words, checked October 2026.

The 7-day truth about Safari

On an iPhone or iPad, Safari can delete a website's stored data after 7 days without interaction with that site. That is a browser rule, built into the system every browser on iOS uses, and it applies to data a website saves in a normal browser tab. If your inventory lived only in a tab you opened once and never went back to, that rule could clear it without asking you and without any warning you would notice.

There is a clear exception, and it is the fix: a web app added to the Home Screen is exempt from that 7-day deletion. Installing the app to your Home Screen — so it has its own icon and opens like an app — puts its stored data on the protected side of the rule. On Android, Chrome takes a different route to the same end: the app can request persistent storage, and regular use of an installed app supports that protection.

The short version: do not keep your list in a browser tab. Install the app to your Home Screen, and export a copy of the file. Those two habits, together, are the protection.

The export ritual: the file is the inventory

  1. After any work session on your list — and at least after every few new items — export the full file: the list as a spreadsheet file, plus every photo.
  2. Keep that exported file in more than one place outside the app: send it to your own email, save it in cloud storage you control, or keep it in your Files or on a computer.
  3. Keep one copy outside your home as well. An inventory that burns with the house it lists cannot do its job.
  4. When you export a newer copy, keep the date in the file name, so the newest copy is obvious at a glance.

Treat the exported file as the inventory itself, and the app as the tool that maintains it. A file in formats anyone can open — a spreadsheet file for the list, ordinary photo files, a printable report — does not need us, or any company, to still exist in ten years for you to open it.

The opposite risk: an account on someone else's server

The other common design holds your list on a company's server, behind an account. That feels safe — until the company changes, is sold, raises its prices, or closes. When a service shuts down, the records held only on its servers can go with it. That is not a theory: Centriq, a home-records app, shut down in January 2026 and deleted its users' data. People who had kept the only copy of their home records inside that service lost them on the company's schedule, not their own.

A list that lives on your device, with exported files in places you control, has no single company that can take it away. There is no account to close, no server copy to be deleted, and no subscription keeping your own list hostage. That is how the InventoryByHand app is built: it runs on your device, it makes one file with your list and your photos, and that file is yours.

A simple keeping routine

  1. Install the app to your Home Screen the day you start. On iPhone, that one step is what protects its stored data from the 7-day rule.
  2. Export after you add a batch of items, and again every month or so while you are building the list.
  3. Keep exported copies in two places, one of them outside your home.
  4. Once a year, open the exported file on a different device or computer and check that it opens and the photos are there.

Start from the free home inventory template if you want the fields on paper first, then keep the finished list the same way: installed, exported, and stored in places you control.